The “World of Warcraft” anomaly turns 20

By blowing out its twentieth candle on Saturday, the online video game “World of Warcraft” demonstrated a longevity rarely observed in this sector, an “anomaly” that it owes to a loyal community and a constantly evolving universe. “It’s a rare game, which has touched so many people, we feel the weight of this heritage,” Ion Hazzikostas, the current director of the game, told AFP, met in August at the Gamescom show in Germany.

This early fan of “WoW” – the acronym given to the game – joined the Blizzard studio, the American developer of the title, in 2008 before climbing the ranks to hold the helm of this “big ship”.

Although it is not the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game (genre also known as MMORPG) to see the light of day when it was released in 2004, “World of Warcraft” enjoyed massive success, quickly bringing together several million players worldwide. It notably benefited from the popularity of the Warcraft brand, a saga of real-time strategy games launched ten years earlier by the Californian studio Blizzard, bought in 2023 by Microsoft.

Two factions clash in a heroic-fantasy world populated by orcs and elves, in a persistent online universe where thousands of players can connect simultaneously, in exchange for a monthly subscription (12 francs per month). There they complete quests, which often require cooperating with other players.

“It was a precursor,” says Olivier Servais, a specialist in online communities, for whom the longevity of “WoW” is an “anomaly”. Because the social aspect of the experience, still in its infancy at the time, will build player loyalty.

“Blizzard has focused on guilds, human-sized communities, which bring together between 30 and 200 players,” explains Olivier Servais, who shared the daily life of one of them for five years, “which is the average size of an association in France. In these groups, “there is flirting, people confide about their daily lives”, weddings and funerals are organized, and the game becomes “a pretext to get together”.

The year of the creation of Facebook, “WoW” thus sketches what the current globalized social networks will be. “It was a lot of people’s first contact with a virtual environment. It was a slightly magical feeling, difficult to reproduce today,” adds the director of the game, who himself played an orc for several years.

Since then, very popular titles like “Fortnite” or “League of Legends” have taken up this social aspect, while adapting it to today’s codes.

At its peak in the early 2010s, “World of Warcraft” claimed more than 10 million active accounts. And undoubtedly many more players for Olivier Servais, particularly because in Asia, several people often share the same account. Their current number is not precisely known, Blizzard does not communicate any data on this subject, but “WoW” still remains very widely practiced throughout the world.

However, “we are not resting on our laurels,” says Ion Hazzikostas. At the end of August, its title welcomed “The War Within”, its tenth expansion, bringing new areas to explore and many changes. Two more are already planned.

“We are trying ambitious things to try to shake up (the players) and keep the game dynamic,” he continues, while these major additions, at the rate of one every two years, also make it possible to incorporate the various feedback from players. To the point that it would be difficult for a user from 2004 to recognize the world of Azeroth where the adventure takes place.

“Twenty years later, it remains a monument but in a gaming and user market which has completely changed,” underlines Olivier Servais, who believes that the MMORPG “has become one genre among others”, whose problem is “ the time necessary to devote to it.

“I don’t see an end on the horizon,” assures the director of “WoW,” drawing a parallel with Marvel or Star Wars productions. And even if the servers were to shut down one day, “Warcraft is a brand (…) and we intend to tell stories in this universe forever”.